There is no doubt at all about the role of a refettled Press Complaints Commission, fresh from a close encounter with an independent working party. This new broom of a PCC will assume nothing and disclose almost everything. Its lay majority is fastened in place. All nominations to membership will be open and transparent. It will ask more editors to serve more regularly, not sit on the sidelines.

If you want to know what the commission decides, and how, you'll be able to read the minutes. If you think the editors' committee that drafts the code is too much of a closed shop, then watch lay outsiders joining in. Add new rights of appeal if you don't like a verdict, new prospects of proactive inquiry when there's a general stink, and newly defined sanctions right up to the point where a delinquent editor is red-carded to his publisher and left to hang onto his job – if he can.

Much of this, to be sure, takes current working and gives it a sharp polish. The commission has had many of these powers, and quite a lot of the procedures, before: but curiously for a press body it hasn't always communicated them boldly or clearly enough. There's sometimes been a kind of muffled, defensive vagueness that has given PCC critics a flying start.

So Vivien Hepworth, the chairman of public relations giant Grayling, and her panel have done a brusquely bracing job – and only two questions remain. Will the newspaper and magazine industry that pays for the PCC stump up more cash to bolt better procedures into place?

And, more philosophically, where does any industry regulator like this go to find "lay" members with the experience and authority to help it develop? Standard PCC critics – politicians, pressure group organisers, sniffy journalists, lawyers with a fee hole to fill – often talk as though "lay" was some kind of superior state rather than describing open minds unsullied by practical experience.

No lawyers on the Bar Council, no doctors on the GMC, no broadcasters on the BBC Trust? You can get pretty silly if you wander too far down this road. Ms Hepworth and her fellow toilers aren't silly at all. They've been smart. But we all need to keep watching what happens next.

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.